Seagate said Monday that the company will ship a 2-Tbyte drive this quarter, but for the enterprise.
Seagate announced both the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES on Monday. Both drives will ship with either a SATA or a Serial-Attached SCSI interface; the Constellation will be Seagate’s first to ship with a SAS 2.0 interface, the company said.
The Constellation’s capacity is an attention-getter, though: 2 terabytes, the same capacity that Western Digital said it had begun shipping last week for the enthusiast PC market.
The tradeoff? Performance, apparently. An ExtremeTech review of the WD 2-Tbyte GreenPower drive found that WD apparently sacrificed some performance for a quieter, lower-power drive. Seagate, on the other hand, says that the Constellation ES was the only 7,200-RPM 2-Tbyte drive on the market; WD doesn’t publicly release the speed of its GreenPower drives.
Seagate didn’t announce the prices of its Constellation drives.
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Seagate Constellation is much more that 2 TB
There has been a lot of coverage of Seagate’s new Constellation family of enterprise disk drives, mostly leading with something about 2 TB. While the 2 TB capacity is newsworthy, Constellation is a much bigger deal than that capacity milestone.
Chris Mellor caught a glimpse of it. Here’s my take:
The first 2 TB enterprise drive. You know that already.
The first 500 GB enterprise 2.5″ high capacity drive. This is game-changing. For the first time, 2.5″ storage systems have a capacity-optimized drive that let them compete with 3.5″ systems on overall cost/GB. As server makers know, the power savings from switching to the 2.5″ drive format dwarfs the incremenal power improvements possible at 3.5″ from any vendor.
The most power efficient enterprise drives available. The Power Choice feature allows system makers to actively manage power at each drive. Most drives are idle most of the time in most applications. Why keep them spinning? Unlike other vendor’s Green schemes, this can be done without sacrificing performance.
All-SAS storage systems and servers. Constellation comes in SATA flavors of course, but also SAS. For the first time, storage and server makers have a full complement of SAS drives: 3.5″ performance (Cheetah), 3.5″ capacity (Constellation ES), 2.5″ performance (Savvio), 2.5″ capacity (Constellation). The door has opened to fully leverage the system-level value of SAS whatever the application.
Universal enterprise encryption. Constellation drives are self-encrypting drives (SED – previously known as Full Disk Encrption). Coupled with encryption capabilities in Cheetah and Savvio drives, core drive-level encryption will able to be implemented across the enterprise. This has huge implications as data centers are being driven to get their arms around data security gaps.
Dell and other OEMs get it. I’d love to hear from other system builders and users. What does Constellation make possible for you? What would you like to see from Constellation that you don’t today?
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